Week 3 Day 1 – Finding Your Groove

I never got around to writing a blog entry this past Thursday, and I hadn’t gotten any coding work done over the weekend, because of traveling… so I spent a lot of today just kind of lost as to where to pick back up

Despite that, I actually got some cool stuff done…

Early in the day, I watched Alison Kaptur’s talk on writing a Python Interpreter in Python – that was definitely informative!! After that, I started reading through the unofficial BitTorrent Specification (which is far more technical/precise than the official one) – I wish I’d started with the official one.

That was graciously interrupted by my last-minute joining up with the Walk Group. Since today was the first Truly Nice day of Warm Weather, we walked around a bit – stopped by the Library, Walked on the Brooklyn Bridge & grabbed lunch on the way back. The daily walks have been one of the most important things I’ve done in Recurse Center. They’re so centering and balancing, and they keep me able to work & keep my energy up throughout the day

After that, I started watching Tom Ballinger’s talk on “Terminal Whispering” (or How To Hack Your Terminal Using Python). That was pretty cool, and it’s definitely something I’d love to play around with later on in the batch.

From there I started reading through CGI (Common Gateway Interface) Tutorials on tutorialspoint.com … They were interesting/informative, but it quickly became apparent that I was going to need to have a set-up Web Stack to really do anything useful with this. Luckily, that’s a project I’m planning to work on later in the batch, when I’ve got a day or two.

After that, we get to one of the best parts of my day: I finally started playing around with useful Sublime Text Shortcuts and modifications. I learned how to extend selections in various ways & how to modify my User Settings. I’m so glad that’s something I can do now. Next step is to create a snippet!!

After that, it was time for r0ml’s talk. It proved to be a very interesting talk. There were definitely some good ideas that I took away from it, and there were some ideas that I didn’t quite connect with as well. It’s really interesting to hear everybody’s perspective on things – it’s definitely one way to learn a lot, and expand one’s view.

After the talk I tried to get some actual coding done, and went through the QQ Tutorial a bit further. When that finished, I played some Bastion for a bit – to focus & unwind. And I finished off the day by upgrading to Python 3!! It will be interesting to see how many things I’ll have to transition. I still have Python 2 on my computer, and Sublime Text has its own Python Builder & REPL … so, I should be good either way!!

Tomorrow, I’m gonna spend more time reading through the full source from the QQ Tutorial, and also maybe try to do a Code Kata, or work on the fundamentals in some other way. I’m not sure what else the day has in store yet, but here’s to giving it some focus.